If you go back a posts on the blogsite, you will see Hugh and Philip at the November Meeting discussing Hugh’s overgrown juniper. This is the Juniper at the meeting.

Yesterday Phil popped down to Hugh’s house to help him get the tree thinned out. As you can see it was overgrown and the balance of foliage to the thickness of the trunk etc is wrong. The tree needed to go back to bare bones to allow for back budding and to allow Hugh to build a new and better structure for the tree.

I’m always asking members to supply me with text and images for this site, and Hugh actually listened. Below you can see the images that Hugh captured yesterday and read is own words how he found the experience. A big well done to Hugh for seeing that so much ‘removal’ was required for the betterment of the tree. Not many take that plunge easily. And of course, well done Phil for thanking the time to help out a club mate. That’s the kind of club we are :-)

Front Before work started.

Original Back before work

Phil at work, looks cold!!

Original Front after thinning

Original back after thinning

This is a juniper i picked up a couple of years ago,As you can see from the photos it was allowed to develop a very heavy and over congested head on the tree,This happened because the tree was continually pinched and all the growth just formed into masses which was described to me as looking like pom poms albeit didn’t look that bad to the untrained eye However my mate Philip from the club thought it could be improved upon and he set about thinning the top of the tree, You will see from the ammount of cuttings around the tree he really got stuck into it,This will allow a lot more light into the tree and encourage it to backbud come springtime.After we finished this stage on the tree we set it into my greenhouse,This will protect it from the ravages of winter and help it to get over the stress caused by such a heavy pruning,Come springtime the next stage for this tree will be to get wired and styled {Hopefully}.At this stage i would like to say how gratefull i am to Philip for taking the time to thin the tree and get it back to some form and style,I looked at the tree and realised very quickly it was a job for superman, you know the guy that wears his trunks on the outside of his boilersuit so i stepped back and let him at it, Job Done, Big Thanks Philip.